As Secretaries Clinton and Geithner went to China, I wondered if and how long before we had a roadmap for the reunification of Taiwan. Such roadmap would be a prerequisite of Chimerica.

However, some important voices consider the notion of a duopoly between China and America (Chimerica) a mirage and suggest that a way out would be for the US and other countries to speak to China with one voice. Moreover, from Der Spiegel, we learn that:

Last month, Beijing completed the last of a series of so-called currency swaps -- providing yuan to other central banks for use in trade with China -- with Argentina, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, and others. These arrangements theoretically removed any need for these trading partners to use the dollar as an intermediary currency in dealing with China. Last week, Beijing denominated a bilateral trade deal with Brazil in the two countries' currencies, rather than in dollars; the value of the agreement was not specified. The value of the other agreements comes to $95 billion (€68 billion). By way of comparison, US-Chinese trade amounted to $333 billion (€238 billion) in 2008.

So China is using bilateralism, not unlike the US has since the end of the Cold War, to grow its status. Moreover, China is coopting US friends as well into her bilateralism.

One can only ask, where is multilateralism when you need it? Bush, the president about whom the Economist wrote that there had been no multilateral agreement to his liking, and his neocon apparatus have a lot to answer for this. The most that camp could come up with was the group of democracies, through the writings of Robert Kagan, during John McCain's electoral campaign.

The challenge now is for Obama to convince the US allies, and the world at large, that there is in the self interest of everyone to continue to support Pax Americana, and the US dollar. In other words, it's worth paying protection tax, as it were. However, the challenge then becomes how to frame LARGE the loses of leaving the US shrinking umbrella when countries and peoples suffer what they may soon imagine as a deluge.

And, for whatever reason, I now feel compelled to make the following observation: There is no tax cut, or at least not as it's been defined by the conservative camp. It's only a taxation position along a continuum defined between front-loading and back-loading.